Grace Period by Gerald W. Haslam (review)

3 1 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 7 Frank Norris lived but thirty-two years and took some time finding himself. He studied painting in Paris and literature at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard, though, like later California writers John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, he took only those courses he felt necessary to become a writer and so graduated from neither university. He was influenced by some of the major forces of his era and their prominent exponents: he studied medievalism and painting in Paris with William Bouguereau, admired the realist style of his mentor, William Dean Howells, and was influenced by Joseph Le Conte’s Berkeley lectures reconciling evolution and religion. He followed the SpanishAmerican War from Key West with fellow reporters Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, and Frederic Remington. He idolized and met Theodore Roosevelt and Cecil Rhodes and parodied but revered Rudyard Kipling. Norris was more at ease than his rancher character, Annixter, with contra­ diction. His writing was often traditional, when it was not shockingly modem for the times, and he never thought it necessary to drop his early romanticism just because he became a spokesperson for naturalism. Like the geologist Le Conte, Norris, who famously called himself “the boy Zola,” was also a churchgoing , though perhaps not ardent, Christian. Norris’s Christianity expressed itself in service to the less fortunate, whether in New York or war-ravaged Cuba. As decent and genial as he was ambitious, Norris interceded with his publishers at Doubleday on behalf of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). And, unlike many who achieved fame in the East (Harte, Twain, Steinbeck), Norris remained a westerner, always returning home to California. Norris dreamed and achieved on a grand scale, from the medieval battle scene he started to paint in Paris to the trilogy two-thirds complete (The Octopus: A Story of California and The. Pit: A Story of Chicago [1903]) when he died. This volume echoes that record: very ambitious, definitely imperfect, but often a pleasure, and— the most important job of a literary biography— an argument to read Frank Norris. Qrace Period. By Gerald W. Haslam. R eno: U n iversity o f N ev ad a Press, 2006. 289 pages, $24-95. Reviewed by Andrew Wingfield G eorge M ason University, Fairfax, V irginia Marty Martinez, the sixty-something narrator of Gerald Haslam’s Grace Period, has recently lost his only son to AIDS. His wife has divorced him and joined a cult; his daughter won’t return his phone calls; his siblings have banished him. A prostate cancer diagnosis makes his already dreary situation dire. But the ill­ ness that threatens Marty’s life ultimately leads to his redemption. An award-winning Sacramento journalist, Marty grew up in Merced, an agricultural town in California’s Central Valley. The toughness he developed on Merced’s mean streets served him well as he blazed his career path but also B o o k R e v ie w s 3 1 5 insulated him from the emotional needs of his family. Cancer tears through Marty’s thick hide. The disease and subsequent treatments sap his physical strength and expose him to feelings of loss, regret, and fear. This vulnerability actually helps him make amends with estranged family members, even as it ripens him for the loving bond he develops with physician Miranda Mossi. Miranda is a divorced mother of grown children and is battling breast cancer. The time she and Marty spend together gives the book its title; their love provides its soul. Cancer determines the nature of their intimacy. They can’t avoid being intensely aware that they enjoy a grace period that will not last forever. Theirs is a love that includes romantic walks along the river and moments of tenderness and passion between people whose bodies have been maimed by invasive surgeries and who contend daily with such unsexy side effects as hair loss, nausea, and impotence. A lapsed Catholic, Marty follows Miranda back to the church. Catholicism’s...